It is Saturday morning, and we are back in Sopers Hole BVI, having cleared in through customs. Lene is at a laundromat 10 minutes walk away, so we will have all clean clothing, sheets, etc.
When last I left you, dear readers, it was on Wednesday, to get the bus back from Cruz Bay to Coral Bay where ILENE was on anchor. But the bus was more than two hours late and during that time we made a new friend, a nice lady who asked if she could share my shady park bench. Her name is Judita Hruza. She and her husband live in West Milford N.J. in the summer and built a house here 18 years ago. She is a holocaust survivor who participated in the death march from the Hungarian border to Mauthausen concentration camp and witnessed the incident in which the guards suddenly shot several hundred of the marchers (in addition to anyone who was to tired, cold, underfed, and sick to keep up the pace. She has written several published articles about the holocaust. We bonded. She is a retired psychiatrist and pediatricia and her husband a retired pathologist. I invited them for a sail, which meant we spent another night in Coral Bay.
They were early at the dinghy dock and we headed southeast to south of Norman Island before returning on the reciprocal course, a sail of about two hours. The only problem was difficulty in getting the anchor up; it tripped and I reset the circuit breaker twice under too heavy a load because it had become caught. I told Lene to go into forward gear and give the boat some fuel, which broke the anchor's hold on the bottom after which the windlass had no trouble pulling it up. When we got back into the bay the Hruska's served us a delicious lunch in the cockpit and took our garbage with them in a big black plastic bag. Then the difficulty at the end of this sail occured: Dzenek, Judita's husband, stumbled on the wobbly floating wooden dinghy dock after alighting from the dinghy and fell into the water. It was not deep and I rigged a foot strap and got him out. He lost a sandal but it was an old one and he was fortunately not hurt. We hope to get the Adult Education Committee of our Temple to invite Judita to speak, but thats not till the spring.
We next completed the circumnavigation of St. John, heading for Maho Bay, which I had visited during my first charter in these enchanted islands. But when Lene saw Leinster Bay, with 21 Natl. Park Svc. moorings and room for 100 other boats to anchor, and only two of them in use, we stopped in Leinster instead of Maho. There are zero services here and we ate the delicious food that Lene cooked and had our most peaceful (no rocking) night on St. John. In the morning we hiked on NPS trails, up hill half way back to Coral where we got some good photos of Cacti and jungle plants growing together, ruins, and trails, and of our boat from above (by this time the two other boats had left leaving the entire bay to us.) Returning to the beach where our dinghy was, we walked the other way, along the coast of the bay to the former Annaberg sugar plantation, now a NPS site. We saw pelicans diving nearby on the way. The mill was atop a hill close to the bay because the windmill (now ruins) drove the rollers that crushed the cane to release its juice. When the wind did not blow horses walked in endless circles to crush the cane. the juice was concentrated into molasses and then either brown sugar or rum, on site. On the way out we met a NPS employee who showed and explained to us the NPS garden containing cane, bananas, bay leaves, cotton, yucca, and several other plants. He gave us some twigs of bay leaves, the odor much more intense than the dried ones in bottles in stores.
After lunch and snorkeling for an hour we motored the two miles to Maho Bay and took another NPS mooring. During our walk I had learned that the senior citizen rate is half of the $15/night we had been paying (a slip with credit card info in an envelope stuffed into a metal box floating on a platform) so we did not pay in Maho. We did dine at the Maho Bay Camp, which is a series of canvas covered cabins, open to the air via screens on all sides.
Ilene here...one day soon we WILL publish pictures to go along with the words. I have been acclimating better than I expected. We are having a lovely time. Weather and surroundings more beautiful than I could have imagined.
Love you!
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